Mr. Foxx’s third release of 2018 is meditative and cosmic

As frontman of the band Of Ennui, Brian Strauss spends a lot of his time making music that’s loud and heavy. The band’s sound is dense and physical, a hybrid of effects-heavy shoegaze music in the vein of Slowdive and crushing doom metal influenced by the likes of Boris. It’s exactly the sort of band that I like to see live, in person, with the volume cranked.

But Strauss has an alternate musical persona: Mr. Foxx. And Mr. Foxx is, in many ways, the polar opposite to Of Ennui. It’s meditative electronic music by a sole musician rather than a band, and it’s best experienced in a quiet space, perhaps in solitude. Yet doom metal and ambient music have a lot in common that might not be obvious on the first listen—they’re both genres that rely on creating an enveloping atmosphere of sound. While with doom metal it can be loud and intense, the effect isn’t that different from a spacious electronic composition. So while the two projects don’t sound anything alike, it makes perfect sense that they’d come from the same musician.

Improvement Among Guests is the third Mr. Foxx release in 2018, and it’s an unconventional release in that it’s a single track that spans the length of an album. This isn’t all that unusual for electronic music—Brian Eno’s done the album-length composition a few times, while Tangerine Dream used to routinely fill an entire side of vinyl with one track. But Improvement Among Guests feels, at times, like a series of pieces rather than one continuous work. Strauss worked in breaks and pauses between the waves of synthesizer to give moments of rest. And that’s not a bad thing to have with a piece of music this massive.

Then again, it’s not overwhelming in the slightest. The album is essentially a series of moody, melodic synthesizer patterns overlapping and creating melancholy melodies. It’s finite but boundless, the composition giving the feeling that it could go on forever and still sound just as hypnotic and lovely. It’s the perfect comedown after being obliterated by doom metal, come to think of it.